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So it has finally happened...my powerbook needs service, ive dreaded this day since ive bought the thing. So its looking like its the battery for some reason it wont charge unless i pop it in and out a couple times..but then it only charges for about 10 seconds then kicks out. Tried it on another powerbook and let it sit with the battery inside of it for 2 hours the whole time it said 0% then took it out..put it in mine and its dead, pop it in and out a couple times...and now its full... (whats going on here) so i shutdown my machine and go home...now the battery is dead !

Gave the folks at apple a call to find out what my options are, cause i still am with in my warreny. well the tech tells me its going to have to be looked at by a apple service rep in my area, thats cool no worries to me..but i ask him this wouldn't happen to be anything like the first batch of ipods are having wtih their battery cause i know someone else that had the some problem with the their PW. right then and there i thought it was over, the agent on the phone took it as almost a threat with a demanding reply " there is nothing wrong with our products " easy killer dont get hyped up over some company secrets.

Anyways to make a long story short ive been told mixed information about the warrenty of the battery, Apple US says 6 months, Apple Canada says 3 months ( do they only expect the battery cells to last 3 months ?) anybody happen to know what the real anwser here is ???

just to post a lil update to the situation...for some reason i had the thought to check the battery level of my "dead battery" and its now reading 98% ( becuase we all know the battery will never charge to 100%), so with this new found glory i unplug my powerbook and were flying wireless all over the house. After a long night of usage bring her back her to bed and she charges right up.

Anyone have this happen to their battery at all where its dead and wont charge one week then perfectly fine the next...or is it doing it purposly to add extra stress to the end of a term ?

the actual battery itself should never reach 100% and that is what bothers me..cause when i am able to get mine to charge it is sayin 100% if you read over the apple document for the power mangement reset i think it is..it says in there the battery should always be within 95-98%.

this battery of mine is totally messed...if i CAN get it to charge and leave it ocnnected over night when i wake up in the morning its depelted its charge or has mysterious lost it. i'll hot plug the battery a couple times while its running and boom my status will change to "calcualting....till full"...then after about 20 mins of that it then says 100%

I recall reading on the web about recovering the charge of lithium ion batteries and tried to find the article but came up with a lot of junk and only this page, which is somewhat relevant and has a bit more information than the paragraphs I quote here:

"Li-ion batteries are not as durable as NiMH and NiCd designs, although they do not suffer from the memory effect. At a typical 100% charge level (notebook battery, full most of the time) at 25 degrees Celsius, Li-ion batteries irreversibly lose approximately 20% capacity per year from the time they are manufactured, even when unused. (6% at 0 degrees, 20% at 25 degrees, 35% at 40 degrees Celsius.

"When stored at 40% charge level, these figures are reduced to 2%, 4%, 15% at 0, 25 and 40 degrees Celsius respectively.) Every (deep) discharge cycle decreases their capacity. The degradation is sloped such that 100 cycles leave the battery with about 75% to 85% of the original.

"When used in notebook computers or cellular phones, this rate of deterioration means that after two to three years the battery will have capacities too low to be still usable."

Further down it says:

"A unique drawback that we can see to the Li-Ion battery is that its life cycle is dependent upon aging from time of manufacturing (shelf life) regardless if it was charged or not and not on the number of charge/discharge cycles. This drawback is not widely publicized."

Not publicized is an understatement.

Maybe the battery -- not the computer -- is two or three years old. The short shelf life explains the even shorter warranty.

could very well be...i do have the original version of the 17 al powerbook and i have had it for almost a year some im sure it sat around apple for a couple years...but who knows...all i know is that apple should be able to warrenty their battery from more than 3 or 6 months...even duracell offers a better warrenty on thier "AA" batteries

Yeah, but AA batteries aren't lithium ion. There is more info on that page on the best way to recharge the thing, and it says: "Look at the manufacturing date. That is when the ageing process commenced."

Somewhere on the web is an article explaining how the charge indicators on laptops can read incorrectly, and I think it involved putting the dead battery in a machine that had a good battery in it. As I recall, the machine reads the dead battery as good because it remembers the reading it had of the good battery.